We are insanely flattered. Epicurious.com, which is the food website of Conde Nast, publisher of Bon Appetit and the late, lamented Gourmet, has named The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day as one of the 53 greatest cookbooks of all time. That’s our book in their picture, right in the middle of some very exhalted company. Bakers like Dorie Greenspan, Julia Child, Peter Reinhart. We’re hyperventilating. Thanks for the shout-out, Epicurious:

“We were surpised that more baking books weren’t nominated… all the baking frontrunners are bread books. The panel’s favorites were Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, and The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart.”

Before I launch into these fantastic buns, our winner of the SuperPeel was… Sandy! Congrats, we’ll be in touch. That contest is now closed.

In this post, I’ll go through the method for using a kitchen scale to measure in flour and other ingredients, which some readers, especially outside the U.S., have said they prefer. In this recipe, I used these weight equivalents for scoop-and-swept cup measures:

1 cup white all-purpose flour: 5 ounces (140 grams)

1 cup whole wheat flour: 4.5 ounces (130 grams)

1 cup water: 8 ounces (225 grams)

Most home scales aren’t accurate enough to weigh small quantities of yeast and salt for single recipes.

These buns are from The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, being cut from a baguette-shaped cylinder, which gives the buns crusty little edges that will impress your guests. They’re incredibly easy to make from any of the lean stored doughs that you already have in your fridge, mixed up from our book… Continue reading →

Whenever Zoe and I are on the Splendid Table, NPR’s cooking show starring Lynne Rossetto Kasper, we leave behind a recipe. Now the show’s national listeners have voted our basic recipe as their all-time favorite (click to view). Thanks Lynne, and all the great producers who create this national show right here in St. Paul, Minnesota.

One thing–an updated, and more extensive online version of our basic recipe is right here on the website, with pictures and more detail (click to view).

Click on the “play” button in the video image above to see Zoe showing all that, using the Master Recipe from the book (the egg-white version, though you can make a version without egg). About stand mixers: We’ve had best results with our gluten-free recipes when we’ve used a stand mixer. Hand-mixing works too, but you really have to go a long time to make it nice and smooth. We have lots of experience with the 5-quart KitchenAid stand mixer. You can use the 6-quart or larger capacity, but we’ve found that those large models have a harder time mixing gluten-free dough.

There’ll be lots of bread, pizza, flatbread, dips and salads to sample–so this is dinner! The coop doesn’t have online so call 612.922.1159 to register. I’ll be sampling recipes from our first three books:

I won’t be doing any gluten-free recipes this night (depending on the response, I may schedule that in the future). I will have books for sale, I believe for all four of our titles (including Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day).

This pizza is so thin and crackly that light shines through it! It’s much easier to achieve perfection with this Tuscan specialty than you might think. You will need a good rolling pin, and the good folks at JK Adams in Vermont have a terrific French dowel rolling pin that we like (especially the thinner 1 1/2″ model), and they’re providing five of them to give away in a drawing here. We prefer these tapered handle-less pins to the handled straight rollered versions–seems that you get better control of thinly-rolled items… Continue reading →

Whenever we hear someone’s giving away copies of our books–we let you know. Head over to the Bob’s Red Mill website to hear about this great giveaway of Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

No, I won’t be mixing, but I will be giving a short talk, answering questions, and signing copies of Gluten-Free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and other titles of ours that B&N happens to have. Details and directions